Raymond Kennedy

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Raymond Kennedy

Born March 3, 1934 (1934-03-03)
Wilbraham, Massachusetts, United States
Died February 18, 2008 (aged 73)
New York City, United States
Occupation novelist, professor
Nationality American
Writing period 1963-2003
Genres Literary fiction
Influences

Raymond Kennedy (March 3, 1934 - February 18, 2008) was an American writer known for his dark, grotesque, absurdist novels.

Contents

[edit] Early Life

Kennedy was born in 1934 in Wilbraham, in the western part of Massachusetts to James Patrick Kennedy and Orise Belanger and was the youngest of three brothers. His mother, of French and Indian descent had been nominally orphaned at a young age and raised by a Yankee spinster living in the remote, rural village of Tolland in the Berkshire Mountains. This up-bringing gave her an abiding love of the countryside, and shortly after her marriage to James Kennedy, the family moved to the isolated country town of Belchertown on the edge of the old Quabbin Valley. The years spent here loomed large in Kennedy's imagination.

He could remember vividly the great hurricane which charged violently across New England on an indian summer day in September, 1938 creating untold damage and destruction. Decades later, he recalled seeing young trees snapping in the winds outside his family's kitchen window early on that day. The scene unfolding outside the kitchen window was the prelude to what, by nightfall, would be reckoned to be the greatest natural disaster in American history until that time.

These same years saw the transformation of the Quabbin Valley into the Quabbin Resevoir, a transformation which uprooted numerous towns and villages in order to supply Boston's burgeoning population with drinking water. The legislation behind this project took three decades to wend its way through the government of the state of Massachusetts, however, by the closing of the 1930's and the end of Kennedy's small childhood, the fate of the towns and villages was decreed and their history ended. By 1940, the Swift River had been diverted and "the great waters" began to rise, submerging the towns of the valley.

Churches, homes, school houses, general stores, and train depots were covered in water. Legend had it that not all the Quabbin Valley residents had agreed to go, and not all the resting corpses had been dug up and moved, and young Kennedy heard tales of Quabbin ghosts haunting the hills around the old valley where he lived. To a young child, who necessarily believes in the permanence of everything about him, this entire story must have seemed incredible and was surely incomprehensible. That Kennedy continued to be haunted throughout his life by those old ghosts of his childhood is clear in his novel, The Flower of the Republic. In this book, several characters bear the names of the vanished towns of Quabbin: there is the ancient, demonic, Old Daddy “Dana” and the avenging young man, Emerson “Prescott.” The town of Nichewaug is used as a kind of “nighttown” or hellish incarnation of the world because of its sonorous similarity to the German word “nacht.”

These early experiences left a mark on Kennedy and shaped his writing in several ways. Each is a story of the awesome power of nature and her elements, and even more, of the amorality of nature and of the moral ambiguity of man. Many of Kennedy’s novels would come to incorporate these twin themes.

Shortly after these events, the Kennedy family left the countryside and settled in Holyoke, a mill town in the industrial heart of the Connecticut River Valley. Here, as in so many New England towns of the period, a tumble of Irish and French immigrants crowded the tenements and worked for meagre wages in the factories, while the by-products of their labor polluted the land around them. The Catholic religion which bound the two immigrant groups together formed the spiritual medium of their world. Because of the particularities of his mother’s upbringing – having been raised by Yankees – and his father’s profession – he was a printer, Kennedy would be in some ways in this world, but not totally of it. To stand with one foot in one world and the other in another, Kennedy would later tell his writing students at Columbia, was often a critical ingredient in the development of a writer.

It was here, in Holyoke, in the mid-to-late 1940s, that Kennedy came to know the generation of young men who had gone off to serve in World War II. He was only 11 years old when WWII ended, and so the perfect age for hero worship. He never tired of re-telling the stories he had heard from the returning vets who hung about the drugstore soda fountain as they re-entered civilian life.

One of these young men had impressed the young boy in particular, a man whom Kennedy called “Airplane Billy.” Billy Rosenberg had boarded for a short time with the Kennedy family as a child, and was like a brother to the young writer. Rosenberg returned from the war to the neighborhood with vivid tales from the battlefields of North Africa and Italy. When Billy died years later in a car accident, Kennedy, who was grown by that time and living in London, sketched his “Epitaph for Billy” and sent it to the hometown newspaper:

At home in peace, Away in war,
Tunis, Salerno, Caserta, Rome.
His name is Legion. He came ashore.
This man was Everyman.
And more.

[edit] Writing Life

After serving in the U.S. Army, Kennedy returned home and under the G.I. bill, studied at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, graduating in 1960 with a degree in English. While there, he studied under the poets Ted Hughes and Joseph Langland, as well as the renowned writing teachers, Bob Tucker and Doris Abramson. Shortly after graduating, Kennedy moved to New York City's Greenwich Village.

Throughout the 1960's, he worked as a staff editor, first for Collier's Encyclopedia and later for the Encyclopedia Americana while writing in his free time. He was taken on by the legendary agent, Henry Volkening of Russell & Volkening, who handled the sale of Kennedy’s first novel, My Father's Orchard. The book was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1963 to some critical acclaim. The story is that of a young man on the edge of adulthood who struggles to reconcile the young man he is becoming with the childhood he is leaving behind. At the heart of the book is the troubled relationship between the protagonist and his father. This short lyrical book is suffused with moving, evocative imagery of the New England countryside and foreshadows the role that such landscapes would come to play in Kennedy's work.

His next novel, written in London in the late sixties, and originially entitled, A Quabbin Christmas, was published by Atheneum in 1970 under the title, Good Night, Jupiter. Good Night, Jupiter shows the beginnings of Kennedy's distinctly boisterous, baroque prose style and incorporates some of the comic and grotesque themes that would dominate his mature work. The story, set on Christmas day, begins bizarrely and hilariously when two young boys take it upon themselves to inter a deceased town elder after the hearse carrying the dead man has to be abandoned in the midst of snow storm. Throughout the rest of the holiday afternoon and evening, the boys pitch from one comic episode to another, ever mindful of the stashed corpse they must hide until they can give it a proper burial. This book received praise from writers and critics such as James Purdy and Lionel Trilling. Trilling said of the book: "one doesn't often come on a novel which shows so much energy and vivacity of spirit."

Shortly after the publication of Good Night, Jupiter, Kennedy's work came to the attention of the editor Gordon Lish who was fiction editor of Esquire magazine at the time. Lish published Kennedy's novella, A Private Station, as a short story under the name "Room Temperature" in 1972 in Esquire. Thus began a long term association with Gordon Lish. "Room Temperature" was also featured in the Lish-edited anthology: "The Secret Lives of Our Times: Fiction from Esquire." In the introduction, Tom Wolfe called Kennedy's story "a case study for the understanding of current fiction." A Private Station was restored to its original form and published privately in the United States in 2005 and by Klett-Cotta in Germany in 2006.

In this novella, Kennedy tells the story of a man named Jack who lives in total isolation in the wilderness until one snowy evening he finds a half-dead tramp in the snow outside of his cabin. At first Jack does what he can to restore the man to health until Dick begins to take on an almost sinister quality, ordering Jack about and speaking angrily about disrelated things. The reader comes to realize that Dick is a kind of malevolent, angel of death figure. This sad but comic story is about the ultimate bewilderment of man. This tale provides a crucial link between Kennedy's work and the theatre of the absurd which had a profound impact on him. Although this is his only frankly absurdist drama, all of his books deal with the themes most prominent in that literary movement, especially with the role of the grotesque.

This book ushered in the 1970s, a troubled decade for Kennedy in his personal and literary life. In a curious parallel, Kennedy himself seemed to enter into the wilderness. He spent part of the 1970's living in various towns in the New England of his youth and parts of it in New York City. He was married by now, to Gloria Berezofsky. The couple's only child, Branwynne, was born in 1974 in Western Massachusetts. With mounting personal problems, he continued writing, though his work life was somewhat sporadic. He worked simultaneously on two things that he would later consider to be the major achievements of his life: a novel, The Flower of the Republic and a philosophical work, The Logic of Discovery. Of the latter, he himself characterized working on it as like being inside the labyrinth, with a million index cards to sort through. It was never finished and Kennedy destroyed it before his death, saving only the introductory chapter.

The Flower of the Republic had a similar, convoluted and troubled history. In its original, unedited form the epic-length novel ran close to a thousand pages. It was conceived of by Kennedy as a Rabelasian, picaresque profane novel and its form was loosely based upon the traveling bard story cycles of the Graeco-Oriental romance stories of the ancient world. The hero, Professor Prudhomme, is traveling the New England countryside looking for his missing wife Priscilla. In doing so, he recounts episodes from his own life and hers to everyone he casually encounters on the way. Weaving together mythical episodes, obscure New England histories, and the mundane details of a gone rural way of life, Kennedy creates a celebration of a place and a past. The novel is ultimately about man's search for himself in the world outside himself and of man's use of personal histories and personal fictions to fix himself permanently in the impermanent world he must live in. The book was edited by Gordon Lish, then a senior editor at Knopf, who cut the book by over 80% and recommended reorganizing the remaining parts of the novel.

While writing The Flower of the Republic, Kennedy wrote and published his third novel, Columbine (1981, FSG). Columbine is a dark love story set in the 1940’s and tells the story of young man’s re-integration into post war society after having served in the U.S. Navy, and his love affair with the girl next door. The book is a haunting tale with some comic underpinnings. Though one of Kennedy’s most realistic novels, it also exhibits the farcical and grotesque characteristics he would come to be known for. Columbine was well-received upon publication. Raymond Carver characterized it as “the genuine article, a novel that will last.”

Kennedy’s next novel, Lulu Incognito (1988, Vintage) was like Columbine, set in a fictionalized version of Holyoke, which Kennedy called “Ireland Parish.” Lulu Incognito is a neo-gothic novel loosely based on the Henry James book, The Spoils of Poynton. It is the story of the psychological manipulation of a young woman by the quasi-aristocratic Mrs. Gansevoort and her son. Lulu Incognito was well received by critics. Richard Eder of the Los Angeles Times said of it that “it seemed not so much written as stitched in poison upon a silken pillow.”

This book was probably Kennedy’s least comic work and after its publication, he began writing what was to be his most outrageously funny book, Ride a Cockhorse (1991, Houghton Mifflin). The book, a satire of the Savings and Loan scandals of the late 1980s, tells the story of a seemingly mild mannered home loan officer who suddenly takes over her sleepy bank. The protagonist, Frankie Fitzgibbons is transformed almost overnight into a hard-charging, fast-talking embodiment of greed, ambition, and sexual voracity. This book garnered Kennedy high praise from critics such as Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, Joseph Coates, of the Chicago Tribune and Katherine Ann Powers of the Boston Globe.

Kennedy’s next book received as high praise, though it dealt with a very different, sobering theme. The Bitterest Age (1994, Houghton Mifflin), set in war-ravaged Nazi Germany is the story of a young girl’s heroic survival in the last days of the war. This novel is currently in development as a film in Germany.

Over the next several years, Kennedy completed another novel which was never published. This book would have been his only book ever to be set in New York City. (A curious fact given that from the age of 30, Kennedy spent his entire adult life living in NYC.) After this, he turned his attention back to one of the worlds of his early childhood, and wrote the manuscript that became The Romance of Eleanor Gray (2003, UPNE). This novel was originally entitled, Into Many a Green Valley, from the poem by W.H. Auden. (Into many a green valley/Drifts the appalling snow.) The story is set at the turn of the century and tells the story of Eleanor Gray who arrives in the Berkshire Hills to take up a teaching post. Once there, she becomes embroiled in the life of another young woman, Evangeline Sewell, who has been outcasted by the late-Victorian society in which they live.

During these years, from 1982 until his retirement in 2006, Kennedy taught creative writing at Columbia University.

Kennedy's archives are maintained at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center and are open to the public.

[edit] Literary Works

His novels include:

  • My Father's Orchard (1963)
  • Good Night, Jupiter (1970)
  • A Private Station (1972)
  • Columbine (1981)
  • The Flower of the Republic (1983)
  • Lulu Incognito (1988)
  • Ride a Cockhorse (1991)
  • The Bitterest Age (1994)
  • The Romance of Eleanor Gray (2003)

[edit] Articles

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